Page 10 - Issue 17

Water Wars:

Conflict & Co-operation

By Lonny Moses, Kibbutz Keshet, Petach Tikva

Recently I found myself in the center of a conflict
over water. I know what you're thinking: The
Middle East… conflict over water… how basic. But
it's not what you think. Let me explain.

The other day, I was inside with a kvutzah of kids
in the after school program I do mesima at,
preparing lunch, when suddenly a fistfight burst
into the room. A boy in 5th grade and a boy in 7th
grade. And how did it all start? Water.

I do mesima at a youth center in a neighborhood
that is defined as distressed, and we have an after
school program for 4th-6th grades run through the
welfare department of the city that gives kids hot
lunch and social programming. This year, the
middle schools we work with approached us to
help them with a group of kids who haven’t been
showing up to zoom classes. We agreed to run a
morning program for them, where they would do
educational activities, some of which are
connected to what their class is doing and some
of which aren’t, but which focus on doing stuff
that they’ll enjoy enough to choose to keep
coming back.